Feb 28, 20219 min read

The Heart is a Hummingbird

Did you know that Hummingbirds resonate with each flower’s sweetness as they fuse within the same ‘love field’?

They will not go near a flower that has less than 15% sugar content apparently.

I recently heard curandero (what spiritual healers or shamans are called in South America) Rocío Alarcón speaking about the ‘spiritual co-evolution of hummingbirds and flowers”(1).

Rocío has a very special relationship with these wonder creatures, the largest family of birds in the world.

This doctor in philosophy and ethnopharmacology from University College London dedicated her life to creating a place where plants and animals could be “safe from human aggression and interference”. In the last twenty years she has purchased 100 ha of primeval rainforest in Ecuador to create such a haven, protecting many endangered species such as the Ocelot, Jaguar, Tapir, River Otter, Happy Eagle, and many species of Hummingbirds… (2)

There is an alchemical reciprocity between these nectar-rich flowers and Hummingbirds. I try to imagine their shared ecstasy as flower and bird both consume and are consumed with this mutual gift of sweetness and the promise of pro-Creation.

Rocío was clearly magnetised and enthused as she spoke of how these magical birds convey a high energy field wherever they go. “This energy lives within the flowers for thousands of years,” she says. “They enrich the healing magnetic fields of plants with their vibrations. They create a love field around them.”

Resonance is a popular word in biodynamic craniosacral therapy (BCST). It is also one that’s become much more mainstream in recent times. You will often hear “I resonate” to mean that someone’s words have struck a cord in another usually because they speak to something familiar to the listener's story or patterns of behaviour.

Resonance relates to sound, to music. One of the few definitions found online is “to produce, increase, or fill with sound, by vibrating objects that are near”(3). Another is to “relate harmoniously”(4).

BCS practitioners are used to attuning their own instruments, to listening to their ‘baseline’ before making hand contact with a client and even before seeing a client. We 'check in' to our whole body frequency, explore its inner and outer map and settle into a grounded stillness. The higher the Health(5) frequency the higher the potency and the more powerful the resonance can be between client and therapist.

The quality of my baseline sets the tone of a session in my experience.

Baselines vary. They are the familiar background melodies we play at any given moment, and can come to the foreground particularly when we are triggered. If you have grown up in a very stressful, disharmonious environment, your baseline patterns are likely to include anxiety and overwhelm (with fight/ flight modes and/or dissociation).

Depending on our trauma history, life events affect us differently. So it is essential for a practitioner to address and explore such stories through receiving craniosacral sessions and any other form of therapy on a regular basis. We are also advised to maintain a healthily resourced lifestyle by eating well, meditating, practising yoga or any activity that will sustain movement in order to enhance the flexibility and biotensegrity of our fascia.

The more I apply the above, the more I give and receive craniosacral sessions, the more my baseline’s tone is harmoniously potent and expansive and the more resilient I am to face what life throws at me.

I have noticed —and I know from speaking with other practitioners that I am not alone— that I am at my busiest when my baseline is at its healthiest and most buoyant.

A change in baseline will not only impact our behaviour and our psyche but it will also profoundly affect how we relate to others and the more than human world. As we are more able to receive and give to a place and the people with whom we are, we are more likely to feel connected. The deeper the radiance, the more grounded in stillness, the more profound the connection and powerful the resonance.

I first saw one of these magical birds when I went to San Francisco over ten years ago and I was mesmerised by their dynamic stillness. I remember feeling my heart and face open wide into the softest smile and my whole being stilling too.

Then a little over a year ago, I had the chance to spend a month just north of SF, in the picturesque town of Fairfax. Like a flower I feasted on Hummingbird energy every time I went out. There were so many there. They were like our red throated robins here, a pure expression of natural magic.

Of course the friendly bonding with my host, the warmth, sunshine, and blue sky definitely helped my baseline expand and radiate but I would intuit that Hummingbird magic also had a lot to do with how well I felt. The town energy itself was quite soft, open and very creative. It felt as if there was a smile on this town’s face every day, and I in turn was the Hummingbird feeding on its sweetness.

Many times I stopped in the streets and paths to welcome the birds’ sublime vibrations, my heart and soul resonating with their radiance, magnetised by their heavenly delicateness, delighting in their unique sound. There is a meditative quality to the sonorous, high speed colourful movement of their wings; like synesthesia in motion.

This delightful town nestled amidst Redwoods and deciduous forests was basking in high energy vibrations, the Hummingbirds' love field inviting and imbibing the wonderfully creative exhibitionism of its inhabitants.

Resonance has a sister called coherence and like Hummingbird and flower they co-evolve.

As Rollin McCraty, of the HeartMath Institute says,”it is the degree of harmony, resonance and coherence in our body’s internal processes that underlies the quality and stability of the feelings and emotions we experience.” (6)

Through various experiments McCraty and his team found that the rhythmic pattern of the heart, the heart rate variability or HRV, was not actually related to heart rate. HRV does not depend on how fast or slowly the heart beats per minute. They also discovered that HRV is a great measure of health and longevity.

The heart is our initiatory organ, it precedes the brain in our embryonic formation. In the womb we first experience resonance and sync with our mother through our heart.

The heart is also a brain, called the heart brain by neuro-cardiologist Dr J. Andrew Armour, with "its own complex nervous system" (6) that supplies more information to the brain than it receives and generates the largest electromagnetic field in the body, about 100 times larger than the brain’s according to HeartMath.

It's interesting to note that there is a "direct neural pathway" from the heart to the brain's alarm bell system and one of our key emotional processors: the amygdala. McCraty adds that the "cells at the core of the amygdala synchronise to the heartbeat."(6)

So maintaining a harmonious and resonant heart coherence can have profoundly positive effects on our emotional and physiological baseline.

“The heart is the most powerful biological oscillator in the body, when the rhythms are 'in tune' with the natural resonant frequency of the heart-brain communication system (i.e. in a state of coherence) the amplitude or amount of of HRV becomes greater.”(6)

One of their fascinating experiments involved detecting a person’s heartbeat in a glass of water by immersing an electrode in it and placing it near the person’s heart. They also measured a person’s heartbeat in another person’s body scientifically confirming what our intuition already knew.

It is through our intuition and awareness that our heart's intelligence expresses. We already know that hearts cohere and resonate with each other, particularly if we are empaths, but beholding the possibility of listening to someone else’s heartbeat in our own body is quite profound and awe-inspiring.

This is what I feel on a regular basis when giving BCST. Very often in fact, the heart takes over, its ‘melting’ and softening a conductor of coherence for the whole body. By this I mean that a heart freed from compressive or restrictive patterns infuses and ripples out its recovered expansive potency to the whole via its electromagnetic field and the web of blood vessels and capillaries bathing our organisms.

In many ways we are the flower, the heart is an oscillating, spiralling Hummingbird and our blood the nectar.

Just like this amazing bird, the heart creates a love field whose frequency and quality very much determines our wellness. HeartMath confirms that, "our emotional state is encoded in the magnetic field radiated by the heart"(6).

The higher the love frequency, the more powerful the energetic and emotional rippling.

In fact all emotions held by the heart can be felt and held more compassionately once there is coherence in the body. On a personal level I have noticed that addictive patterns which would arise due to triggers from past traumatic experiences have much less grip as I experience more coherence and resonate with healthier resources.

I am more able to spot these patterns as they unfold and engage in a felt sense dialogue through my heart around them. I am also more sensitive and emotionally expressive: a piece of music or writing can easily set off effusive tears which I welcome and listen to as one of my heart's ripples.

"The body holds the score"(7) indeed and the heart is an alchemist that can turn "an ego-system" into "an eco-system" (8) and facilitate the emergence of greater social coherence.

HeartMath's Howard Martin explains how the non-verbal inclusive and compassionate language of the heart helps to 'attune' participants with incoherent HRV to the more coherent members of the group (6).

Martin cites a study showing that a hill will appear less steep to two hikers emotionally bonded than if they were hiking on their own. The same goes with conscious dancing and group meditation, the 'energy' felt in a group facilitated with love is usually much higher and richer than on one's own. I have witnessed this on a number of occasions in class environments and as I facilitate a craniosacral session with a client.

Not surprisingly I have noticed a lot more patterns of heart restriction due chiefly to anxiety, frustration, anger and depression in the last year as Ireland has been in 'lockdown' mode with severe social and physical restrictions imposed for most of that time. These would have compounded underlying conditioning or created new zones of inertia caused by emotional overwhelm.

I personally have never been more aware of the love field of my heart as I have doubled on resourcing in nature, explored creative expression, danced, meditated and endeavoured to 'swim' beneath this viral swell.

As I attune to my heart's coherence I witness my clients unwind, decompress and open, unlocking and surrendering to theirs.

Throughout society the heart's intelligence spreads its benevolence blindly.

"Social coherence is happening more and more as the planetary shift is accelerating", Martin notes. In the face of a tragedy, community or family heart coherence generally increases, and "natural disasters tend to open people's hearts" creating more social cohesion by syncing emotions along empathic midlines.

I landed in Fairfax only a day or two after the electricity was restored following a series of fires which devastated the neighbouring forests of Marin County. Smoke was still in the air and lingered for quite a long time. But the town's legendary Halloween parade went ahead regardless and felt like a binding release of creative relief.

From social to global, how does Earth's electromagnetic field resonate with ours? HeartMath created the Global Coherence Initiative (GCI) guided by the following hypotheses:

"The earth's magnetic fields are a carrier of biologically relevant information that connects all living systems.

"Every person affects this global information (...) There is a feedback loop between human beings and the earth's magnetic energetic/magnetic systems. Earth has several sources of magnetic fields affecting us all..." (6)

They quote research that shows that disturbances in the earth's magnetic field affect sleep, mental clarity and emotional balance and that the opposite also holds true.

"The earth and ionosphere generate a symphony of frequencies ranging from 0.01 hertz to 300 hertz. Some of these are in the exact same frequency range as those occurring in our cardiovascular system, brain and autonomic nervous system."HeartMath's Deborah Rozman writes (6).

HeartMath created a worldwide network of coherence monitors to track these correlations and found that,"we may be more deeply interconnected with earth's fields than previously seen." (6)

This deeply resonates and fills me with joy. To borrow Rocío's words, as between Hummingbird and flower, there is and has been a continuous "spiritual co-evolution" between Earth and all living beings.

This would explain the paradigm shift we are witnessing globally as a growing number of people resort to alternative ways of healing and align with their heart's and soul's songs and longings.